Hot impact/erosion test facilities typically include custom test rigs that are labor intensive to set up and expensive to run and maintain. They typically include a combustion system and a particle delivery system, and, in fact, there are relatively few such systems available—most are located at universities or other research institutions. On the other hand, there is a large installed base of systems for applying coatings to various industrial components, including high temperature components such as turbine buckets or blades. These systems typically employ any one of several well-known thermal spraying techniques to apply various coatings to such components. This invention seeks to take advantage of the various known thermal spray coating systems by using them to conduct hot impact/erosion testing to determine the durability of the component coatings (or of non-coated component materials).